https://www.yahoo.com/now/daszaks-coronavirus-grant-rejected-pentagon-200800644.html
The Pentagon's research and development arm rejected a multimillion-dollar proposal by EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak in 2018 over concerns the experiments involved gain-of-function research and “could have put local communities at risk.”

Daszak, a longtime collaborator with China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, has dismissed as conspiracy theories the possibility that COVID-19 was created through gain-of-function research. But the online sleuth group DRASTIC released documents from EcoHealth Alliance’s “DEFUSE Project” last month, revealing a March 2018 proposal to Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) seeking $14.2 million for research to make bat viruses more dangerous.

“Our goal is to analyze, predict, then ‘DEFUSE’ the spillover potential of novel bat-origin high-risk SARSr-COVs in Southeast Asia," read Daszak's proposal. "This will safeguard the U.S. warfighter.”

The proposal called for inserting spike proteins that could bind to human cells into "SARSr-CoV backbones" and said, "We will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in Vero cells and human airway epithelial cells cultures.”

DARPA rejected the proposal, saying it potentially involved the controversial gain-of-function research, which entails manipulating viruses to make them more transmissible and was restricted by the U.S. government at the time.
..